Top 100 Edward Abbey Quotes
#1. Money confers the power to command the labor of others. Love of money is love of power. And love of power is the root of evil.
Edward Abbey
#2. In the afternoon I watch the clouds drift past the bald peak of Mount Tukuhnikivats. (Someone has to do it.)
Edward Abbey
#3. [I]t is the writer's duty to write fiction which promotes virtue, the good, the beautiful, and above all, the true ... It is the writer's duty to hate injustice, to defy the powerful, and to speak for the voiceless. To be ... the severest critics of our own societies.
Edward Abbey
#5. You cannot reshape human nature without mutilating human beings.
Edward Abbey
#6. I'd sooner exchange ideas with the birds on earth than learn to carry on intergalactic communications with some obscure race of humanoids on a satellite planet from the world of Betelgeuse.
Edward Abbey
#7. There is a certain animal vitality in most of us which carries us through any trouble but the absolutely overwhelming. Only a fool has no sorrow, only an idiot has no grief - but then only a fool and an idiot will let grief and sorrow ride him down into the grave.
Edward Abbey
#8. Home is where, when you have to go there, you probably shouldn't.
Edward Abbey
#9. Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit, and as vital to our lives as water and good bread. A civilization which destroys what little remains of the wild, the spare, the original, is cutting itself off from its origins and betraying the principle of civilization itself.
Edward Abbey
#10. Reason has seldom failed us because it has seldom been tried.
Edward Abbey
#11. Whenever I read _Time_ or _Newsweek_ or such magazines, I wash my hands afterward. But how to wash off the small but odious stain such reading leaves on the mind?
Edward Abbey
#12. A city man is a home anywhere, for all big cities are much alike. But a country man has a place where he belongs, where he always returns, and where, when the time comes, he is willing to die.
Edward Abbey
#13. Pure science is a myth: Both mathematical theoreticians like Albert Einstein and practical crackpots like Henry Ford dealt with different aspects of the same world.
Edward Abbey
#14. In that moment of truce, of utter surrender, when the rabbit still alive offers no resistance but only waits, is it possible that the rabbit also loves the owl?
Edward Abbey
#15. Poetry
even bad poetry
may be our final hope.
Edward Abbey
#16. The death penalty would be even more effective, as a deterrent, if we executed a few innocent people more often.
Edward Abbey
#17. Our 'neoconservatives' are neither new nor conservative, but old as Babylon and evil as Hell.
Edward Abbey
#18. The one thing ... that is truly ugly is the climate of hate and intimidation, created by a noisy few, which makes the decent majority reluctant to air in public their views on anything controversial ... Where all pretend to be thinking alike, it's likely that no one is thinking at all.
Edward Abbey
#19. We should restore the practice of dueling. It might improve manners around here.
Edward Abbey
#20. Too many American authors have a servile streak where their backbone should be. Where's our latest Nobel laureate? More than likely you'll find him in the Rose Garden kissing the First Lady's foot.
Edward Abbey
#21. Recorded history is largely an account of the crimes and disasters committed by banal little men at the levers of imperial machines.
Edward Abbey
#22. Alaska is our biggest, buggiest, boggiest state. Texas remains our largest unfrozen state. But mountainous Utah, if ironed out flat, would take up more space on a map than either.
Edward Abbey
#23. Baseball is a slow, sluggish game, with frequent and trivial interruptions, offering the spectator many opportunities to reflect at leisure upon the situation on the field: This is what a fan loves most about the game
Edward Abbey
#24. Nothing could be more reckless than to base one's moral philosophy on the latest pronouncements of science.
Edward Abbey
#25. In both metaphysics and art, honesty is the best policy. Keep it clean.
Edward Abbey
#26. The great question of life is not the question of death but the question of life. Fear of death shames us all.
Edward Abbey
#27. I want to be able to look at and into a juniper tree, a piece of quartz, a vulture, a spider, and see it as it is in itself, devoid of all humanly ascribed qualities, anti-Kantian, even the categories of scientific description.
Edward Abbey
#28. If we had the power of ten Shakespeares or a dozen Mozarts, we could not produce anything half so marvelous as one ordinary human child.
Edward Abbey
#29. Sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul.
Edward Abbey
#30. Three words remain that can yet stir the blood of man: the word 'rebellion'; the word 'revolt'; the word 'revolution'.
Edward Abbey
#31. One single act of defiance against power, against the State that seems omnipotent but is not, transforms and transfigures the human personality. At least for a time. For a while. Perhaps that is enough.
Edward Abbey
#32. What is reason? Knowledge informed by sympathy, intelligence in the arms of
love.
Edward Abbey
#33. There never was a good war or a bad revolution.
Edward Abbey
#34. What is the essence of the art of writing? Part One: Have something to say. Part Two: Say it well.
Edward Abbey
#36. I am my brother's keeper, says the chickenshit liberal. Perhaps he does not
realize that he now has more than 2 1/2 billion brothers.
Edward Abbey
#37. [R]eality and real people are too subtle and complicated for anybody's typewriter, even Tolstoy's, even yours, even mine.
Edward Abbey
#38. Grand opera is a form of musical entertainment for people who hate music.
Edward Abbey
#39. A cowboy is a farm boy in leather britches and a comical hat.
Edward Abbey
#40. A crude meal, no doubt, but the best of all sauces is hunger.
Edward Abbey
#41. One mile farther and I come to a second grave beside the road, nameless like the other, marked only with the dull blue-black stones of the badlands. I do not pause this time. The more often you stop the more difficult it is to continue. Stop too long and they cover you with rocks.
Edward Abbey
#42. I, too, believe in fidelity. But how can I be true to one woman without being false to all the others?
Edward Abbey
#43. Concrete is heavy; iron is hard - but the grass will prevail.
Edward Abbey
#44. When the situation is hopeless, there's nothing to worry about.
Edward Abbey
#45. Appearance versus reality? Appearance is reality, God damn it!
Edward Abbey
#46. Mexico: where life is cheap, death is rich, and the buzzards are never unhappy.
Edward Abbey
#47. Longevity, like intelligence and good looks and health and strength of character, is largely a matter of genetic heritage. Choose your parents with care.
Edward Abbey
#48. I've wrecked and ravaged half my life in the pursuit of women, and I suffer the pangs of about seventeen regrets
the seventeen who got away.
Edward Abbey
#49. Jesus don't walk on water no more; his feet leak.
Edward Abbey
#50. In the end, for all our differences and conflicts, most women and men share the same food, work, shelter, bed, life, joy, anguish, and fate. We need each other.
Edward Abbey
#51. If you feel that you're not ready to die, never fear; nature will give you complete and adequate assistance when the time comes.
Edward Abbey
#52. Spartacus, like Jesus, was also crucified by the Romans. And for equally good reasons.
Edward Abbey
#53. There are two kinds of people I cannot abide: bigots and any well-organized ethnic group.
Edward Abbey
#54. I was once invited to take part in a heroic, possibly fatal enterprise, but I declined, mainly on account of sloth.
Edward Abbey
#55. The city, which should be the symbol and center of civilization, can also be made to function as a concentration camp. This is one of the significant discoveries of contemporary political science.
Edward Abbey
#56. Every man should be his own guru; every woman her own gurette.
Edward Abbey
#57. New Yorkers like to boast that if you can survive in New York, you can survive anywhere. But if you can survive anywhere, why live in New York?
Edward Abbey
#58. Opera: I like it, except for all those howling sopranos and caterwauling tenors. (Why can't tenors sing like men?)
Edward Abbey
#60. The Latino military fare badly when they stumble into war with the gringos. But in the torture, murder, and massacre of their own people, they have always performed with brilliance and elan.
Edward Abbey
#61. From the point of view of a tapeworm, man was created by God to serve the appetite of the tapeworm.
Edward Abbey
#62. Of course I litter the public highway. Every chance I get. After all, it's not the beer cans that are ugly; it's the highway that is ugly.
Edward Abbey
#63. Paradise for a happy man lies in his own good nature.
Edward Abbey
#64. We are preoccupied with time. If we could learn to love space as deeply as we are now obsessed with time, we might discover a new meaning in the phrase 'to live like men.
Edward Abbey
#65. The consolation of reading biography: Most great men have led lives even more miserable than our own.
Edward Abbey
#66. Running the big rapids is like sex: half the fun lies in the anticipation. Two thirds of the thrill with the approach. The remainder is only ecstasy-or darkness.
Edward Abbey
#67. It is vital that we avoid any hint of moral superiority in our dealings with one another in the environmental movement; if it developed into factionalism it would destroy us, as factionalism has destroyed so many other progressive movements in America.
Edward Abbey
#68. No man likes to be smoked out of his hole in February.
Edward Abbey
#69. I think the evil is in the food, in the noise, in the crowding, in the stress, in the water, in the air.
Edward Abbey
#70. Saving the world is only a hobby. Most of the time I do nothing.
Edward Abbey
#71. Philosophy without action is the ruin of the soul. One brave deed is worth a hundred books, a thousand theories, a million words. Now as always we need heroes. And heroines! Down with the passive and the limp.
Edward Abbey
#73. Be loyal to what you love, be true to the earth, fight your enemies with passion and laughter.
Edward Abbey
#74. I now find the most marvelous things in the everyday, the ordinary, the common, the simple and tangible.
Edward Abbey
#75. I come more and more to the conclusion that wilderness, in America or anywhere else, is the only thing left that is worth saving.
Edward Abbey
#76. Terrorism: deadly violence against humans and other living things, usually conducted by government against its own people.
Edward Abbey
#77. If I should object to force I will be arrested. If I object to arrest I will be clubbed. If I defend myself against clubbing I will be shot. These procedures are known as The Rule of Law.
Edward Abbey
#78. The rich are not very nice. That's why they're rich.
Edward Abbey
#79. A crowded society is a restrictive society; an overcrowded society becomes an authoritarian, repressive and murderous society.
Edward Abbey
#80. Men have never loved one another much, for reasons we can readily
understand: Man is not a lovable animal.
Edward Abbey
#81. Anarchism is not a romantic fable but the hardheaded realization, based on five thousand years of experience, that we cannot entrust the management of our lives to kings, priests, politicians, generals, and county commissioners.
Edward Abbey
#82. There has never been an 'original' sin: each is quite banal.
Edward Abbey
#83. High technology has done us one great service: It has retaught us the delight of performing simple and primordial tasks - chopping wood, building a fire, drawing water from a spring
Edward Abbey
#84. There has never been a day in my life when I was not in love.
Edward Abbey
#86. Everyone should learn a manual trade: It's never too late to become an honest person.
Edward Abbey
#87. One word is worth a thousand pictures. If it's the right word.
Edward Abbey
#88. Abolition of a woman's right to abortion, when and if she wants it, amounts to compulsory maternity: a form of rape by the State.
Edward Abbey
#89. Going to bed with Gertrude Stein, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Susan Sontag, or Margaret Thatcher: There are some things one prefers neither to do nor to have done.
Edward Abbey
#90. Nothing can excel a few days in jail for giving a young man or woman a quick education in the basis of industrial society.
Edward Abbey
#91. Anarchy works. Italy has proved it for a thousand years.
Edward Abbey
#92. The true, unacknowledged purpose of capital punishment is to inspire fear and awe
fear and awe of the State.
Edward Abbey
#93. Those art lovers who pride themselves mostly on *taste* usually possess no other talent.
Edward Abbey
#94. It's a fool's life, a rogue's life, and a good life if you keep laughing all the way to the grave.
Edward Abbey
#96. Narrow-minded provincialism: Sad to say but true
I am more interested in the mountain lions of Utah, the wild pigs of Arizona, than I am in the fate of all the Arabs of Araby, all the Wogs of Hindustan, all the Ethiopes of Abyssinia ...
Edward Abbey
#97. As Mark Twain said, 'I love Wagner
if only they'd cut out all that damned singing!'
Edward Abbey
#98. Why must love always be accompanied
sooner or later
by sorrow and pain? Why not? Because pure bliss is for pure idiots.
Edward Abbey
#99. There is beauty, heartbreaking beauty, everywhere.
Edward Abbey
#100. Might does not make right but it sure makes what is.
Edward Abbey
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